I took off at midday and drove east to Cahokia Mounds. I know little about them, even though there is plenty of information out there. I climbed up Monk's Mound, the largest man-made pre-Columbian... thing north of Mexico.

It was the best of civilization, for that time, that place, 1000 years ago. They knew nothing of the Imperial Palace or the Vatican, or Caesar, or Jesus, or Muhammad. What they did know was a great forest around them, filled with abundance, also filled with danger. For some reason, over successive generations, they built a mound that was like a small mountain, their way to the sky.

I ascended stairs to the top and saw the St. Louis skyline, highways, smoke from factories, smoke from burning brush, trailer parks, and the horizon, 360 degress around.

I tried to strip it away and see it as it was 1000 years ago. I could see flashes of color where now there is now fall brown grass, and smoke from burning brush.

Then I tried to see as it will be 1000 years from now. I saw savannah, made as it once was, before man, guarded by a nearly invisible intelligence, but no smoke.

I believe that stewardship of such things will ever increase, that we will never have our own Taliban.